A hodgepodge of stuff just waiting for consumption

Category Archives: Random

I was racking my brain for a post tonight when I started browsing through my “random” photo folder in Dropbox, which features – tellingly – random and embarrassing photos through the years. I thought it would be fun to post some (in chronological order) of them with present-day annotations.

Let’s start with my bat mitzvah, shall we? There are many fun things about this picture. We could start with the cheesy staged photos, the amazing 90s wallpaper, how about the hairdo that at the time I thought was the shit, but looks like a grandma’s from the 60s. Don’t even get me started on those heels.

Look at the mid 90s decor

When I was a senior in high school, I thought I was the shit driving around the city with my friends. We were so cool, that we often videotaped us having amazing and enlightened conversations as I drove around the city. You can tell this is 1999-2000 by the blue sunglasses and the frosted lips. Don’t worry. I’ve posted two of these for your viewing pleasure.

Who didn’t want blue sunglasses?

Just hanging around at a playground, as one does in high school.

Fast forward to college, where naturally there is a plethora of embarrassing pics. First, I share a picture before a fraternity formal my senior year of college. This seems innocuous enough, until you see the upper ear piercing.

The blond hair and purple eyeshadow really make this look

What college experience is complete without an 80s party? Here, I bring you the peak of embarrassment with my costume at the Sigma Chi 80s party. I think I was trying to be Jennifer Beals…

No witty caption will do this justice

Now we enter post-college life with a photo from my hashing days. Hashing is when you run and drink beer – sometimes simultaneously. There are many ceremonies and traditions in each hash club, but one is for new members of the hash to be the drink bitch. This is me pouring shots in a questionable apron. I have a word to pick with anyone who thought the blond hair was acceptable.

Paying my dues by pouring drinks to drunk runners

Hi! Welcome to my 25th birthday. I had recently started dating my future husband and still liked to be social for my birthday. Later that night, I tripped over a curb while carrying a jumbo slice and bruised my leg in a ridiculous fashion. I still have a dent there…

We were oh so young.

It was worth it for the jumbo slice

Here is an unflattering photo from my wedding! Anyone who has been to a Jewish wedding knows that the bride and groom go up into a chair. It’s a big thing. It’s also scary as hell and you are implicitly trusting drunk people to hoist you up, keep the chair even and not drop you. You can tell I’m totally chill about this.

My husband had way more people wanting to carry his chair than mine.

After this, there is a considerable gap between my next overtly embarrassing photo (though I imagine people coming out of the woodwork to tell me I’m wrong). I leave you with this. Taken a week before moving from Austin back to Chicago in 2014. A bunch of us rented a boat, took it to a cove, where we drank and floated in intertubes. I won’t delve into the state I was in, but suffice to say it looked like it was a great time.

This looked like it was fun!

I hope you enjoyed this trip down memory lane with me! Tomorrow, stay tuned for more insightful and interesting content.

I wouldn’t say I have chronic insomnia, but sleep is not something that comes naturally for me. For one, I hate the quiet. I’m not the most talkative person, but I like noise. I constantly have headphones when I’m in my office – either listening to podcasts or Spotify – because I hate the silence. I always have the TV on in the background when I’m not home, even if I’m not paying attention to it. If the TV isn’t on, then music is.

It’s for that reason, I developed the nasty habit of falling asleep to the TV. I break every rule that people who struggle with sleep aren’t supposed to do. I read on a Kindle Paperwhite and/or play on my phone, while falling asleep to the TV (praise whoever invented the sleep timer). If it’s silent, I’m left to deal with my own thoughts, which in and of itself is an abyss of neverending swirl. That’s what happened last night and the only thing I could do was open my computer to get more work done (as I mentioned it’s a busy time) so I could silence the voice telling me every single thing I had to get done or think about or navigate. Anyone who saw me at work today knows I only got five hours of sleep without even asking.

It comes and goes in waves. I’ll have weeks where I can fall asleep within five minutes, and weeks where it takes me forever. Melatonin helps sometimes, but not every time. Often, I’ll go several weeks on a minimal amount of sleep to function – because I still like to wake up early for exercise – and then will have several days in a row when I’m passed out at 8pm. If I take a nap in the middle of the day, I won’t be able to fall asleep until after midnight. If I happen to wake up for some reason around 4am, that’s it. I’m up for the day and won’t fall back asleep. Brain is already churning. I would say I get a full night’s sleep without waking at some point maybe once a week.

This doesn’t even take into account that I’m a light sleeper. I’ll wake up to any movement or sound, which isn’t ideal when you are partnered up. My long-suffering husband is used to me literally screaming in frustration for him to stop snoring or to get over to his side. I turn into the devil when I’m in a “can’t sleep” phase and I’m woken up this way. He’s a trooper. He also can fall asleep anywhere, anytime.

When our son was a newborn and still sleeping in our room. My lovely partner would get up in the middle of the night to get the baby and bring him to me so I could feed him, and then would return him when he was done because he could easily fall back asleep. I had tried getting up when my son needed me, but moving around aroused my senses and alertness too much that I could never fall asleep after he was done eating. Multiply that by 3 times a night and you have even more of a zombie than the usual new mom.

I know I’m not the only person with sleep issues, and mine are probably mild compared to people who suffer from chronic insomnia. I know I’ll get back to “easier” sleep. I always sleep better the more I run, and the upcoming training season will help with this.

Right now, it’s 8:45 p.m. I’m going to go get ready for bed at 9pm. Wish me luck that I’m asleep by 10pm.

I’m not feeling very inspired to write anything interesting today, so I’ll just recap my day for you fine folks! It’s not often I have a full day of 1-on-1 time with the little guy, so it was different and special enough for me anyway.

6:45am. I wake up to the sound of an almost five-year-old screaming “ANYONE!” This is my son’s standard morning greeting. He typically says it when he thinks we’re working out downstairs. I had warned him last night that I might be on the treadmill when he woke up, so to check downstairs if I wasn’t in my room. Spoiler alert: I was not on the treadmill when he woke up. I was in my bed. He usually knocks ominously three times before barging in when he’s awake. I can’t decide which form of waking up I prefer.

7-9:30am. Breakfast, TV and tantrum time. Waffles and bialies for breakfast this morning. For a hot second my Keurig wasn’t working and I was stressing big time how I was going to get caffeine in. If I don’t have it by 9:30, headaches and The Hulk come to play. We watched some PBS Kids and CBS Sunday Morning like cultured people. Then it was time to get ready for swimming. As much as I prepped him for this yesterday, the inevitable freak out ensued. He is terrified of swimming and hates his swimming lessons. We’re trying to get him to at least tolerate the water before camp this summer, but it’s been a struggle. Spoiler alert: We did not make it to swimming.

10am. We leave to walk to Julius Meinl, one of the best places in Chicago to meet some people for brunch. While only 4 blocks away, it will take about 20 minutes because there’s lots to see. We spent five minutes observing a worm in a puddle. The kid asks if he can bring it to school to show his teachers. I tell him that he cannot. We settle on a picture/video. On the walk, we talk about going for a run in the jogging stroller in the afternoon. He seems game.

10:30am. Brunch and more coffee. I get the baked eggs with basil, onions and goat cheese, with sourdough toast and the best coffee. Coop gets a blueberry poppyseed scone with peach jelly. We are very cultured. We also both take way more of our friend’s french toast than is socially acceptable because we are animals.

I posted these on my Instagram story first… Thus the captions.

12pm. We head on over to visit the recently opened Amazon Books! If I’m buying a hard copy, I try to buy from an independent bookstore, but I also do buy a lot on my Kindle so I was curious to see what the fuss was about. It was pretty neat! Good selection of books, good presentation, decent kids section. You can pay by scanning a bar code and showing it to the cashier, allowing you to basically pay with your online Amazon account and get your Prime discounts. I was into it. There were some weird and obnoxious book selections though…

1pm. After a leasurely walk home, we decided to tackle the afternoon. I change really fast and get the jogging stroller set up for a run outside. HA! Just kidding, that obviously didn’t happen. Do you know what did happen? We read books. Real talk: it’s probably one of my favorite things to do with him. If reading to him now sets him up to be a lifelong reader and lover of books, I’ll consider this parenting thing a job well done.

2pm. I can tell he’s a little beat so I turn something on TV that will most certainly knock him out. Chicago By Boat, hosted by Geoffrey Baer on the PBS app on Apple TV. You guys want to put an almost five year old to sleep? Put on a Chicago architecture program hosted by Geoffrey Baer. It literally works every time.

2-3pm. With Coop knocked out I read and get some work done. I keep the Chicago show on because these programs are incredibly watchable and I regularly say “huh!” aloud when I learn something new. We love these shows so much that we donated $300 to PBS so The Hubs and I can go on an architecture boat tour with Geoffrey Baer this summer. As my kid would say “I’m not kidding!”

3-5:30pm. I’m hitting my stride with some work I need to get done when he wakes up, so I throw him on the computer for some PBS Kids games. He asks if we can keep the Chicago show on (it’s 2 hours). I say “Obviously.” After about 30 minutes the computer game goes off with some protest. He asks to do a Lego dump. A Lego dump is when we roll out a rug and literally dump his entire box of thousands of Lego pieces on to it so he can make an infinite amount of fighter killer bad guy people. I say fine, as long as he plays upstairs by himself for a bit while I finish up my work. He says “Yup! I can do that!” He lasts 20 minutes before coming down. I consider this a win. We talk as I multitask to wrap things up.

5:30pm. I MADE MYSELF DINNER TONIGHT! After ordering way too much pizza last night, I made myself a healthy bowl of farro (made on the stove), broccoli (steamed in the microwave), mixed with beans, salt, pepper and salsa. It was delicious! I made my kid a hummus sandwich with some brocolli on the side. I also give him some farro to try. I tell him that he can have some Trader Joe’s gummies if he tries the farro. #Parenting. I get him to eat it by feeding it to him with the airplane method like a baby. He tries more than I expect him to.

6:30pm. We’re hanging on the couch listening to some music on Spotify. I refuse to listen to kids music if I can help it. As a result, my kid’s favorite songs are I Can’t Feel My Face by The Weeknd, Boom Clap by CharliXCX and Alexander Hamilton from the musical. I feel totally okay about this.

7pm. I tell him its time to go upstairs. He does so with minimal complaint, which is surprising because we’re way under the normal ratio of freakouts for the day. When I tell him its time to clean up his Lego dump, he predictably loses it and meets his freakout quota for the day. I set a five minute timer. It doesn’t work. We negotiate. He really just doesn’t want to totally put everything away so he can play with the Legos in the morning. The only reason I agree to this is because I need something to distract him when I get ready for work tomorrow morning since I’m still on my own. I foresee a freakout when I tell him its time to go to school and to step away from the Legos. This is tomorrow morning’s problem.

7:15pm. Teeth are brushed. PJs are on. We skip bath tonight because he had a really good one last night and I’m all about not trying to ruin this good thing we have going on today. Reading a Magic School Bus chapter book about whales. I agree to read a second chapter because the first one was only two pages. This makes me feel like mom of the year. I mentally prepare myself to run on the treadmill after he’s asleep.

7:30-7:40pm. The “I’m scared, kiss and hug, cuddle, did you know that [insert fun fact here]” dance commences. It was relatively minor tonight as I agreed to hang and cuddle for a few. People say to enjoy these moments because they don’t last forever, and I totally get that. But I also really really like when my kid goes to sleep.

7:40-8pm. Lounge in bed checking shit on my phone. Mentally preparing to run on the treadmill. Spoiler alert: I did not run on the treadmill. I am already hungry because sometimes healthy food is not filling. I eat a PB&J bar from TJs.

8pm-now. Pour myself a glass of wine, throw my kid’s laundry in, put some food away, laugh at the dishes in the sink and the likelihood I’ll actually do them, write this post.

Now-10pm or so. Read, watch reruns of 2 Broke Girls and the start of Seinfeld. Mentally prepare to run on the treadmill in the morning. THIS TIME IT WILL HAPPEN.

I have nothing in particular to write about today, so I’m phoning this one in because Sundays are my “get shit down around the house day.” Saturdays are usually reserved for quality parent-child time and generally recovering from the work week. Yesterday involved bagels, baseball, vegging and a night alone watching and donating to PBS while The Hubs was at a work event. I have no complaints on any of this.

Sundays are reserved for long runs, laundry (more on that in a minute), reading, more kid time and doing some actual WORK work if I feel a need to get ahead of the week (which today I did for about three hours… ugh).

So laundry… We all do it, but no one talks about it (or is that the other thing that everyone does… but actually everyone talks about that one). This is the one household chore that falls under my responsibility. The Hubs takes care of literally almost everything else.

This is all the laundry I’ve done and have to fold this evening.

Living in a house with two dudes + me, means that we generate A LOT of laundry. Two of us work out 5-6 days a week and obviously wears different clothes to work, one of us is a five year old who gets dirty a lot. You could imagine the amount of clothing this generates in a single week. This does not include sheets and towels, which don’t get changes nearly as much as they should. (If we don’t have honesty during this writing challenge, what DO we have?)

Allow me to share – in a perfect world – the loads of laundry I will do on Sunday, including folding and putting away, if I’m feeling super motivated and not at all lazy (which is 25% of Sundays a month):

“Street” clothes, as the hip kids call it – 3 loads, including whites, mediums and darks. I am OBSESSIVE about sorting and if a medium gets mixed with a dark and/or an exercise gets mixed in with “street” I will lose it.

Kid clothes – 1 load. This is where anarchy sets in because I will not spend the mental energy sorting and categorizing clothes he will wear for 6 months and will likely destroy before then

This is seriously the bare minimum that needs to get done weekly for us to function as a household. I probably do it like every other week. Maybe. OR, I’ll get all the laundry physically in the washer and dryer, but it will remain unfolded until more laundry needs to get done. I haven’t even covered the towels, sheets, cloth napkins that The Hubs insists on because environment or the delicate/dry clean only clothes maybe addressed (really I have stuff from the summer that I haven’t cleaned yet). It. Never. Ends.

I wasn’t planning on writing this much about literally my least favorite subject, but as you can see, I desperately am procrastinating all of this. Please wish me luck.

Oh wait, there is also this full dryer and washer that also needs to be dealt with.